Gunman Kills Three U.S. Doctors in Yemen

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, December 29, 2002

A suspected Muslim extremist shot and killed three American doctors at a missionary hospital in Yemen on Monday, security officials said.

A fourth American doctor was wounded in the attack in at Maaden hospital in the town of Jibla in Ibb province, 120 miles south of the capital San`a, the officials said on condition of anonymity.

The officials said the attacker was a suspected Muslim fundamentalist who entered the hospital's complex and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle and a gun.

One of the doctors killed was a woman.

The officials declined to say whether the gunman was apprehended or provide other details.

In Washington, a State Department representative said on condition of anonymity that they were aware of the shootings in Yemen, but have no information to give out at this time.

Impoverished, factionalized Yemen has for years been a haven for Muslim extremists and is the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden enlisted thousands of Yemenis to fight alongside the mujahedeen of Afghanistan in their U.S.-backed war against an occupation Soviet army in the 1980s. Many returned when the Soviets withdrew, and they are a powerful political force here.

On Oct. 6, an explosives-laden boat rammed a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, killing one member of the tanker's crew, tearing a hole in the vessel and spilling some 90,000 barrels of oil.

An intelligence official in Washington has said U.S. experts believed the attack on the tanker, the Limburg, was the work of operatives with links to bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Statements attributed to bin Laden and his network's "political bureau" hailed the explosion on the tanker but wouldn't confirm al-Qaida's responsibility.

The attack on the French tanker was similar to the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in the southern port of Aden.

Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed in the Cole attack, which was blamed on al-Qaida.

Yemen has cooperated with the United States in the war on terrorism launched after the Sept. 11 attacks.

U.S. and Yemeni agents have worked together in a counterterrorism center in Yemen equipped with sophisticated intelligence gathering facilities. The Americans have trained Yemeni troops to fight militants. Yemen allows the U.S. military to use its territorial waters airspace.

Yemeni security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say up to 3,000 U.S.-trained Yemeni troops have been deployed recently in areas known to harbor wanted al-Qaida members.

In November, a CIA-operated Predator drone fired a missile that killed bin Laden's top lieutenant in Yemen, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, and five other al-Qaida suspects in Yemen.